My
slaves for cereal idea lasted about a month. I have now updated it and we'll see if it lasts another four weeks. The first version had a few problems. One was that it seemed unfair for Mel to clean the girls' room mostly by herself and all her little sisters got credit with her for it. Also, the girls room got messy every day and was a big job everyday for Mel, whereas the two boy rooms stayed relatively clean, so that also didn't seem fair to Mel. Another problem was that the whole idea didn't even work for Joseph and Ethan (the two oldest boys, pathetic huh?) Joseph did go through the effort to make his bed a few times, which I appreciated. Would be nice to reward that somehow, cause I did appreciate it. Still he hadn't done enough to earn cereal. Ethan wouldn't do jack the first day, then knew that he wasn't going to be able to earn it, and then continued to not care or even try for the rest of the week. Last reason is that Ethan has just been so sad without cereal, he doesn't have, and I quote "anything to look forward to in life". Isn't that sad? SO, the new deal is for them to do work, I won't nag, they can work for as much kid's cash as they want to earn via this new system:
- Bed: 25¢
- Room: 25¢ - 75¢ (depending on the messiness)
- Chore for Mom: 25¢ - $1
And then as soon as they have $2 in kids cash (not legal tender), they can buy a bowl of cereal, but I'm only doing mild sugar cereal, aka Honey Blenders and Honey Scooters. None of this Fruity Dyno-bites garbage (Grape Nuts are still free cereal, but I haven't had any takers the past month. Children don't recognize it as food)
So now I'm just writing in what they earn each day. As you can see, Wes and Abi did great yesterday. Joseph, thank you for making your bed.
Natalie isn't on the chart, cause she's queen and can have cereal everyday if she wants. But look at this, she likes putting the silverware away! This is her second time helping me, I thought it was pretty precious. And she puts them all in the right spot too, better than
two year old Sophi did (being able to see helps with that) good job using the step stool Natalie!
Abi did great tonight, she cleaned the whole kitchen by herself and was a good worker, plus it was a bit of a mess, making it a $2 job. She happily ate her bowl of cereal this morning. The younger kids seem to be motivated, we'll see if it works for the older ones.
Wesley also suggested that they could save their cash and we could do a
Mom Store like we did 3 years ago. I'm open to that. So we'll see how this chore idea goes and what tweeking we need to do to it in 4 weeks.
